The Great Wander

Even being three miles off the coast, the quiet, the stars to the east of the boat.  Not seeing anything else out there, save a freighter or a cruise ship on the horizon, it’s magical.  There’s a peace that comes with sitting at the helm on a calm night with the disconnection from everything except checking your course on the chart plotter every so often that you don’t find in too many other places in the world.  I’ve found it in the mountains and in the more remote lakes of Minnesota, but there’s not a lot of places that I find that kind of peace.

There’s nothing there to make any noise.  All you hear is the lapping of the waves against the hull and hull slicing through the water.  Occasionally the sails will flap a little and you adjust course to fill the sails completely again and the silence resumes. 

It sounds amazing, right?  What I’m not describing is being awakened after three hours of restless sleep because your partner is ready for a break.  Or trying to figure out what the radar is showing a mile ahead of you.  It’s not all magical, there’s difficulty as well, but that’s what makes the good times so much better.  I remember filming a sunrise for TikTok, thinking, this is what I wanted for us.  Watching the sun break over the horizon and shades of red, orange, and purple lighting up the sky.  It really was breathtaking.

The first overnight passage was from Titusville (Cape Canaveral) to West Palm Beach.  Initially, we were full of nervous energy.  What if the cruise liners get too close?  How will we avoid objects floating ahead of us (Are there objects floating around?)?  How are we going to see where we are going?

I had some experience from my trip to Key West, so I was aware of what to expect and all of those nerves dissipated as the night went on.  The night went on and we managed our shift schedule by just going until we needed some rest and then we’d switch. Initially we’d planned on going all the way to Boca Raton, but the Gulf Stream was getting closer to shore and was really slowing us down.  Little did we know, it would really slow us down the next overnight passage.  

So, we determined we weren’t going to get to Boca Raton on this day and turned into the Palm Beach Inlet.  It was a little choppy at that point because now the waves were slamming into the side of the boat instead of moving us from behind.  We adjusted course to minimize the slamming and worked our way into the inlet, where there are several anchorages along the ICW.

When you come in from the Atlantic to an inlet in Florida, you are going to end up on the ICW.  What this means is that once you set anchor, expect wake from passing boats.  Sometimes it’s ok, sometimes, you don’t climb the three steps from the hull to the salon.

Palm beach has some nice attractions.  There’s a manatee center, a manmade Island, and a little shopping area near the marina.  It was a nice place to hang out for a few days, but we really wanted to keep heading south.  

After checking the weather predictions, mostly for comfortable waves, we knew we had to leave by about 6 that evening to make the window and arrive at a decent time to anchor at Key Biscayne.  We raised the anchor and headed out, this time starting in the dark.  To the east, the stars lit up the sky enough you could tell you were moving.  To the west, the city lights light up the coast line.  You could almost see the line where the city lights vanished and the darkness of the ocean consumed them.  

For the next 12 hours we took turns sleeping when we could.  Going up to relieve the other when we couldn’t sleep.  As the sun broke through the horizon the next morning, nowhere near as far south as we had hoped, we started looking for a place to take a break before Key Biscayne.  We knew we didn’t want to anchor in the dark, but it looked like that was going to be unavoidable.

Approaching the destination anchorage, we watched the last remnants of the sun dip below the horizon.  It was mostly dark but with a few remaining moments of twilight, we could tell we were far enough from the shore that we weren’t going to swing into through the night and we were far enough from other boats that even if we drug anchor, we’d be ok until we repositioned.  Now it was time for some rest.